On monday March 1, Dutch newspaper NRC Next devoted two pages to articles on Google. One article by Peter Teffer, ”Maakt het internet ons dommer?” (does the Internet dumb us down?) features an interview with Geert Lovink. The other article is an experiment by two NRC reporters, Teffer and Pfauth, who attempted to live and work without the use of any Google service for a week. The article and report (both in Dutch) are online here.

In the last week of January, an NYU graduate class conducted a similar experiment, see an earlier blog post on it here.

Internet board game from box.net

The term Googlization, according to Siva Vaidhyanathan, is the process of being processed, rendered, and represented by Google.

Vaidhyanathan’s upcoming book The Googlization of Everything investigates the actions and intentions behind the Google corporation. This afternoon at The Society of the Query Vaidhyanathan choose one issue from his book: the politics and implications of Google Maps’ Street View.

According to EU law: there cannot be any identifiable information about a person in Google Street View. Google’ s standard defense up till now has been that they respect privacy by scrambling faces and license plates, to which Vaidhyanathan commented,

In my former neighborhood in New York there were probably 50 illegal gambling institutions around. Now, imagine an image of me on Google Street View taken in proximity to one of these illegal places. I’m more than two meters tall and I’m a very heavy man. You could blur my face forever, I’m still bald. In New York, usually I was walking around my neighborhood with a white dog with brown spots, everyone in the neighborhood knew that dog. So you could blur my face and it still wouldn’t matter – it’s me, I’m obviously me. Anonymization isn’t an effective measure, as we’ve already found out with data. (most likely referring to the AOL case of user #4417749)

Just this morning Swiss authorities made a statement that they plan on bringing a lawsuit against Google in the Federal Administrative Tribunal because Google isn’t meeting the country’s demands for tighter privacy protection with Google Street View. Vaidhyanathan commenting on the news said, “Google Street View has been entering so many areas of friction and resistance – this brings it to our attention that the game is over for Google.”

Vaidhyanathan’s criticism of Google Street View continued with Google’s trouble in Tokyo. “The strongest reaction against Google Street View has been in Japan,” he said, “Google will scrap all of their data from Japan and re-shoot the entire country. Google mismeasured how the Japanese deal with public space. In the older sections of Tokyo the street in front of one’s house is considered the person’s responsibility, it is seen as an extension of their house. Thus, Google Street View is actually invading someone’s private space.”

Earlier this year Google CEO Eric Schmidt made the following remark about the international appeal of Google,

The most common question I get about Google is ‘how is it different everywhere else?’ and I am sorry to tell you that it’s not. People still care about Britney Spears in these other countries. It’s really very disturbing.

Vaidhyanathan explained this as being a part of Google’s protocol imperialism,

Google isn’t particularly American, nor is it particularly American / Western European. It’s important to remember that Google is much more a factor of daily life in Europe. In the United States it is just barely 70% of the search market, in Western Europe it is around 90% and in places like Portugal it is 96% and I don’t know why.

For Vaidhyanathan the biggest problem with Google is that as it expands into more parts of the world that are less proficient, and less digitally inclined, there will be more examples of friction and harm because more people are going to lack the awareness to cleanse their record.

It’s important to note that Google does offer services for protecting and managing user data:

• Google Street View allows you to report objectionable content
• Google dashboard shows a summary of all the data Google stores about you.
• An engineering team within Google that refer to themselves as The Data Liberation Front is working to make it easier for users to control the data they store in Google’s products.

Vaidhyanathan didn’t specifically mention these options, but briefly acknowledged the existence of such tools before quickly moving onto the strongest part of his argument, “We in this room are not likely to be harmed by Google because all of us in this room are part of a techno-cosmopolitan elite. Only the elite and proficient get to opt out.”

In closing, Vaidhyanathan exemplified the problem with a photograph of a man caught on the side of a U.S. highway and commented, “This man doesn’t know that he is in Google Street View so we get to laugh at him. Not knowing is going to be the key to being a victim in this system.”

More information about Siva Vaidhyanathan and his criticism of Google can be found on his website, and in this lively Google debate at IQ2 and New York Times article from last year.

With: Siva Vaidhyanathan, Martin Feuz  and Esther Weltevrede

Moderated by Andrew Keen.

Moderator: Why does no one talk about money?

Vaidhyanathan: Google only loses money. They have an interest to keeping people interacting with the Web. As long as you are interacting with the web, they can track you via cookies and that puts more data in their database. It is a clear but third degree connection for creating revenue. It also has interest in data- and text accumulation. It hopes to create a real text-based search. In terms of Google search; global and local are not really put to for example; Google books. This already biases the search results.

Weltevrede: It also depends on your perspective on Google. For me it is interesting to see how it works. How does it organize and present the information we get.

Vaidhyanathan: nobody is going to Google for the ads.

Audience (at Weltevrede): you were depending on the Google translation results?  Isn’t that tricky?

Weltevrede: indeed,  Google Translate is still in beta version. However, human rights is such an important term that one can assume that it is translated well.

Audience: how about methods? It is difficult to pose yourself against the machine. All of us here agree that searching sucks and that Google is bad and commercial. So I’d like to have some reflection on methods in order to be critical against searching and how they relate to your research?

Vaidhyanathan: Google is hard to study in traditional way. I do my best to keep to fuzzy, flabby arguments of narrative and argument. Opacity is the problem of Google. You cannot research is without using it. You risk becoming a banned user. You have to warn Google about your research, in which you may alter the results.

Weltevrede. I agree, I want to add that you can study the inner workings by looking at output, you can tell a lot about that

Feuz: it is an attempt to look at temporal relations: You have to try and fund ways to be able to ask these questions.

Moderator; What I do not understand is the connection between the most opaque company ever which are still fetishing transparency.

Vaidhyanathan: it does not fetishize it; it leverages it. We do the work for Google, we provide the information and content Marx would scream at this notion. We are all very happy to do it (user-generated content). It is a better environment than we used to. However, we have to grasp the workings. Maybe we are very content with our relation to Google.

Weltevrede: it is also what building tools you can get out of Google. You can make use of the giant – building on Google; let Google work for us again.

Manovich (audience): I have difficulty to see your (Feuz’s and Weltevrede’s) results as research. What is the sample size? Where is the statistical data? You haven’t looked at the interdependencies of the variables? So what kind of science is this? If these things are not clear, these results are not meaningful.

Feuz: there is a difference between types of research. In the kind of research I did, I worked 4 month in a team gathering data. The amount of data we needed was already overwhelmingly large. You have to keep in mind that the thing is really temporal.

Vaidhyanathan (at Manovich): Is it not very expensive what you do? How can you do this?

Manovich: Most things are done in open source software and only takes five minutes.

Rogers (audience): Responds to the question by Manovich on what kind of science this is: it is diagnostics! Are local Googles furnishing local sources? It is a kind of critical diagnostics to see how Google works, and to see at the implications.

Manovich: Is it then issue exploration to be followed by hypothesis?

Moderator: I live in Silicon Valley, There is more skepticism there about Google. They cannot fight the real-time twitter economy. What is the relevancy of Google right now? What are your thoughts about this? Will it remains strong?

Vaidhyanathan: I am very bad at predicting. For the sake of my book, I hope they stay relevant? The rapid changes of Google have made me realize I must not write about current companies anymore. You have to keep in mind, though, that the real time web is not that connected (yet). So much of what Google tries to do is to satisfy the Cosmo-elite because this group makes the choices and the critics. What are the initiatives that Google has in India, China and Brazil? That is a more relevant development to look into.

Feuz; we researchers cannot cope with the patterns of change – they can adopt fast, so they will survive.